The General Will: Rousseau's Theory of Democratic Sovereignty

In the spring of 1762, a fifty-year-old Geneva-born composer and unsuccessful political theorist published a small book in Amsterdam. The Émile and the Social Contract appeared within a few weeks of each other; both were condemned by the Parlement of Paris; the Émile was publicly burned; the author was forced to flee France, mostly in the rain. The Social Contract contains the most famous phrase in the history of democratic political theory: whoever refuses to obey the general will “will be compelled to do so by the entire body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free.” The phrase is the founding text of the Jacobin tradition and the permanent object of liberal horror. Both reactions are, in different ways, correct.

Rousseau’s concept of the general will (volonté générale) is the most contested idea in modern democratic thought. The debate has been going on since 1762, and the heat of the debate is itself a sign that the concept is doing real work. Most of the major political theorists of the last two and a half centuries — Kant, Hegel, Constant, Tocqueville, Marx, Mill, Talmon, Arendt, Habermas, Rawls, Pettit — have had to take a position on the general will. The position has usually been either enthusiastic or horrified, and the reasons for both reactions are worth understanding.

The problem Rousseau was trying to solve

Rousseau’s theory of the general will was developed in explicit opposition to the contractarian tradition he had inherited. The contractarian tradition — Hobbes, Locke, the various writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who had developed the social contract — had based its political theory on the idea of natural rights, on the protection of the private interests of the individuals, and on the establishment of a government that would serve as the neutral arbiter of conflicts among these interests. The state was, in this picture, a kind of umpire; the citizens were, in their private lives, left alone.

Rousseau’s complaint was that this picture was incoherent. The state as umpire presupposes a society of pre-political individuals with settled interests; but in any actual modern commercial society, the interests of the individuals are themselves products of the social order. The propertied classes have interests that are not the same as those of the propertyless. The merchant has interests that are not the same as those of the artisan. To let these interests fight it out in the political arena, with the state as a neutral umpire, is not to leave them alone; it is to let the more powerful interests use the state to entrench their advantages. The liberal state, in Rousseau’s diagnosis, was not the neutral umpire it claimed to be; it was a class instrument masquerading as a neutral arbiter.

This is the diagnosis that Marx, half a century later, would make famous. But Rousseau’s solution was not Marx’s. Rousseau was not a socialist; he was not even, in the modern sense, a materialist. His solution was to argue that the proper foundation of the political order was not the protection of pre-political interests but the construction of a common interest, arrived at through the deliberative processes of democratic self-government. The general will was his name for this common interest.

What the general will actually is

The general will, for Rousseau, is the will of the citizenry as a whole directed at the common good. It is not the same as the “will of all” (volonté de tous), which is the sum of the private interests of the individuals. The general will is what the citizens would will if they were properly informed, if they were not subject to the influence of partial interests, and if they were considering the matter from the perspective of the common good.

This is a demanding conception. The general will is not the same as the majority view. A majority of citizens can be mistaken about the common good; in fact, they will be mistaken about it whenever they are subject to the influence of partial interests. The general will, properly understood, is what would emerge from a properly conducted deliberative process. The conditions for that process — small size, economic equality, civic education, the rejection of factions — are demanding, and Rousseau knew it. He was not naïvely optimistic about the possibility of any actual political community satisfying them. He thought, however, that the conditions were the proper object of political aspiration.

The most famous statement of the principle is in Book I, Chapter 6 of the Social Contract: “Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.” The formulation is the source of the modern conception of the citizen as member of a political community, with rights and obligations that derive from the membership rather than from the prior status of the individual. The formulation is also, as the critics have pointed out, the source of the modern conception of the citizen as member of a collective that may override individual dissent.

”Forced to be free”

The sentence that has done the most damage to Rousseau’s reputation is also the sentence that contains the most useful clue to what he meant. Whoever refuses to obey the general will “will be compelled to do so by the entire body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free.”

The two standard readings are well known. The first reads the sentence as a noble statement of civic freedom: the citizen who is brought to recognize the common good and to act in accordance with it has, in a meaningful sense, been brought to freedom. The second reads the sentence as a justification for the suppression of dissent in the name of the collective. The historical record of the reception of the Social Contract suggests that the second reading is, in practice, the more dangerous one. Robespierre and Saint-Just, the architects of the Terror, claimed Rousseau as their inspiration, and they had a textual case for doing so. The Terror is not what Rousseau meant; it is also not an unreasonable extrapolation of what Rousseau said.

The scholarly debate is, however, more interesting than either of the two standard readings. The point is that Rousseau’s concept of the general will is not a doctrine about what the majority decides. The general will is, by definition, the will directed at the common good. If a particular majority decision is not directed at the common good, then it is not the general will, and the dissenters are not refusing to obey the general will; they are refusing to obey something else. The space between these two propositions is the space in which the concept has been both fruitful and dangerous. The liberal critics, beginning with Constant in 1815, have argued that the gap is unbridgeable in practice; the defenders, beginning with the deliberative democrats of the late twentieth century, have argued that the gap is exactly what democratic politics is for. The debate is not closed.

The French Revolution and the long shadow

The general will was a central concept in the French Revolution, especially in its radical phases. Robespierre claimed Rousseau as the inspiration for the Cult of the Supreme Being, for the revolutionary calendar, and for the program of civic education that the Jacobin regime attempted to implement. The rhetoric of the general will was everywhere in the revolutionary assemblies; the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen of 1793, the most radical of the revolutionary declarations, is saturated with it.

The Terror of 1793–1794 was, accordingly, the most consequential test of the concept. Robespierre’s argument was that the Terror was the application of the general will in conditions of counter-revolutionary emergency; the survival of the Republic required the temporary suspension of the rights of its enemies. The historical judgment on this argument is well known. What is worth noticing is that the concept survived the Terror. The Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen of 1795 — the post-Terror document — still invokes the general will; the Constitution of the Year III still invokes it; the post-revolutionary republican tradition in France has never quite abandoned it. The concept is, as Talmon argued in 1952, the source of a kind of political temptation that liberal democracy has to resist. But the concept is also the source of a kind of political aspiration that liberal democracy cannot entirely do without.

Modern democratic theory

The general will has had a remarkable afterlife in twentieth-century democratic theory. The contemporary theory of deliberative democracy, developed by Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) and Between Facts and Norms (1992), is in part a reconstruction of the Rousseauian idea. The deliberative democrats argue that the proper functioning of democratic politics requires more than the aggregation of private interests; it requires the development of a common understanding of the public good, achieved through the deliberative processes of democratic politics. The process is procedural, but it is not empty: the deliberative process is supposed to transform the preferences of the participants, by exposing them to better arguments and to the perspectives of others.

Rawls’s “original position” argument in A Theory of Justice (1971) is, in some ways, a reconstruction of the Rousseauian idea of the general will in a more rigorous and more contemporary form. The parties in the original position, behind the veil of ignorance, are supposed to choose the principles of justice from a position that abstracts them from their particular interests. The principles that would be chosen from such a position are, in Rawls’s argument, the principles that the citizens would choose if they were properly considering the matter from the perspective of the common good. The parallel to Rousseau is deliberate.

The general will has also been criticized, especially in the twentieth century, as a source of totalitarian political tendencies. The most famous version of this critique is J. L. Talmon’s The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1952), which argued that Rousseau’s concept of the general will was the source of the totalitarian political movements of the twentieth century. The argument has been influential, and it has been developed in different ways by critics across the political spectrum. The defenders of Rousseau have replied that the general will, properly understood, is not a doctrine of totalitarianism, and that the proper reading of the Social Contract is one that supports the values of democratic self-government and civic engagement.

The three great critiques

The liberal critique, developed in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by Constant and Tocqueville, was that the Rousseauian concept was incompatible with the values of individual liberty and the protection of minority rights. Constant’s 1815 essay on “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns” argued that the freedom of the moderns — the freedom of commercial life, of private independence, of the protection of individual rights — was different from the freedom of the ancients — the freedom of direct participation in collective self-government. The Rousseauian attempt to revive the ancient conception was inappropriate for the conditions of modern commercial society.

The pluralist critique, developed in the twentieth century by Isaiah Berlin and the various theorists of pluralism, argued that the Rousseauian concept was based on a false assumption about the existence of a single common good. In modern pluralist societies, there are many different conceptions of the good, and the political life is properly understood as a process of bargaining and compromise among these various conceptions, not as a process of identifying and implementing a single common good. The pluralist critique has been especially influential in the Anglo-American tradition.

The communitarian critique, developed in the late twentieth century by MacIntyre, Sandel, and Taylor, has argued that the liberal and pluralist critiques of the general will are based on a false conception of the individual. The communitarians argue that human beings are essentially social beings, that their identities are formed in the context of particular communities, and that the political life is properly understood as the expression of a common conception of the good rather than as a process of bargaining among private interests. The communitarian critique has been influential in the contemporary debate about the foundations of political life.

Why the concept persists

The general will is the most contested concept in modern democratic thought, and the contest is unlikely to be resolved. The reason is that the concept is doing real work in two different directions. It is the source of the modern conception of democratic citizenship as something more than the protection of private interests; and it is the source of the modern temptation to suppress dissent in the name of the collective. Both of these consequences are real. The defense of the concept requires acknowledging both, and accepting that the question of which consequence predominates is, in the end, a question about the conditions under which democratic politics is actually practiced. The concept is not safe. It was never meant to be safe. The question is whether a democratic politics without the aspiration it represents is possible, and whether such a politics would be worth having.